So the first round of donation pleas are being sent. Sending out mass-mails is an art and a science, none of which I claim to be good at. I'm sure lots of these mails are being spam blocked or whatever, but we can only do so much to given our resources to get the word out. One good piece of news is that paypal donations may actually be a possibility in the very near future. Imagine that.

I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: I appreciate all the efforts and contributions (in all forms) of our wonderful volunteer user base. I know we're already getting your valuable computer time, so the monetary donations you may decide to give us are in addition to your current level of generosity.

Anyway.. back to work. What was I working on? Oh yes. Data pipeline stuff. What else... So we did end up abandoning that strangely resource-hungry science database index building task. We're now just dumping the whole table fragment to an ascii file, dropping the fragment, and rebuilding from scratch via that file. That may end up being a lot faster after all.

An ATI version of the client is currently in beta test. I have no idea about anything beyond that, but it seemed worthy of at least mentioning it here.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Can you tell how big the database is these days, Matt? The Informix database at that. It was asked a couple of weeks ago in one of the lower forums. People wanted the ability to download it or browse through it.

Thanks for that Matt. I had been wondering why the splitters were running again after the routine Tuesday maintenance as you had wanted to commit a lot of database resources to rebuilding that large Astropulse table's index. If it can get done quicker through means other than consuming the database resources it saves having to halt workunit production which is great for all of us.

Is actually everyone getting the email with the words "You've been identified as one of our most active volunteers"? Well, I got one and all my job done this year fot seti was worth about 130,000 Cr... that's what some others do in a day. Not that I don't like to be one of the most active ones or something, but it made me curious if there is a limit?
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Is actually everyone getting the email with the words "You've been identified as one of our most active volunteers"? Well, I got one and all my job done this year fot seti was worth about 130,000 Cr... that's what some others do in a day. Not that I don't like to be one of the most active ones or something, but it made me curious if there is a limit?

I'm guessing it's sent to all active accounts. My Seti RAC is in the neighborhood of 15-20. Got mine yesterday. It doesn't appear to be personalize in any way other than the salutation, unlike the WCG newsletters for example, which contain specific sub-project number breakdown.
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Boinc V7.2.42
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB, GTX470

I'm guessing it's sent to all active accounts. My Seti RAC is in the neighborhood of 15-20. Got mine yesterday. It doesn't appear to be personalize in any way other than the salutation, unlike the WCG newsletters for example, which contain specific sub-project number breakdown.

If they could tie a work unit to a particular candidate pulse in the NitPkr, then you could put those candidate signals in the email. What a way to reward a year's worth of results. Maybe they could do that for next year's email.

... It doesn't appear to be personalize in any way other than the salutation ...

The version I received didn't have a personalised salutation in the body of the email, it just says "Dear SETI@home volunteer,
I'm Dan Werthimer, the Chief Scientist of the SETI@home project.
You've been identified as one of our most active volunteers,"

Seti@home knows my name and where I live, but I am happy to get a generic non-personalised email rather than have Seti@Home waste resources on something more complicated.

However I was actually a little offended by the (presumably unthinking ?) assumption in the email that everyone who donates computer time and or money is a resident/taxpayer of the USA.

It said "your gift is tax-deductible" - I assume that is true for those paying US tax, but I don't think it is true everywhere else in the world.
as an example http://www.ird.govt.nz/donee-organisations/

It would have been easy to substitute "may be" for "is", or specify "for US taxpayers" or whatever the appropriate correct wording actually applies.

Aurora Borealis wrote
[quote
It said "your gift is tax-deductible" - I assume that is true for those paying US tax, but I don't think it is true everywhere else in the world.
as an example http://www.ird.govt.nz/donee-organisations/

It would have been easy to substitute "may be" for "is", or specify "for US taxpayers" or whatever the appropriate correct wording actually applies.

Martin.

The fact is that it is NOT true in the majority of countries on this globe. U.S stands out almost by its own even in that regard.

As a side note, that special tax deductible rule, is one of the reasons why the U.S has such enormous amount of crazy religious cults (yes they too can become tax deductible entities very easy) One example only would be the criminal cult of Scientology.

I thought something was odd when I left this account unused for 3 years (demand was far higher than I realised) and actually only got into it around October this year yet I was considered "as one of our most active volunteers". I look at most people's records here and wonder how I even come close to that :-P
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